Sunday, June 22, 2014

Sexually Confused Chaplain at National Cathedral

Preaching at today's "worship service" at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. is an ordained Episcopal (ECUSA) priest who is touted as the first openly transgender priest to do so. The Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge, 40, who first partnered as a lesbian decades ago and then later, while claiming to be a man, married that same female partner (now raising two pre-pubescent sons), is currently the Episcopal chaplain at Boston University with the goal of influencing the development of young adults.

[College is] “an amazing time to explore one’s faith, one’s tradition, to explore how their intellectual life and their sense of vocation connect with their broader sense of who they are.”-- Dr. Cameron Partridge, transgender priest, "father & husband," and former lesbian

Partridge was in the process of being ordained as a priest when he[she] told his[her] bishop, The Rt. Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, that he[she] was transitioning from female to male in 2001. Shaw supported his[her] decision and has gone on to become a dedicated advocate for trans issues within the diocese of Massachusetts. . . .

Washington National Cathedral is one of the most high-profile Christian advocates for LGBT equality. In 2013, [Gary] Hall announced a policy of blessing same-sex marriages, and held a service to celebrate the Supreme Court's rejection of the Defense of Marriage Act.

In clerical black and collar, there is no physical hint that the bearded and bespectacled chaplain was once female. . . .

As he takes over the University’s part-time Episcopalian chaplaincy, Partridge, who lives outside Boston with his wife and their toddler son, says he wants to minister with the empathy that has sometimes been denied him since he completed his transition to a man in 2001. His father, for example, no longer speaks to him. “It’s not my choice,” he says. (Most family and friends accepted him after long conversations.)

Pondering a gender change began with his doctoral studies at Harvard
Divinity School in the ’90s. “I was out as gay at that point,” he
recalls. . . . With the change, “I felt like I was able to kind of
reclaim the body that God had given me.”

While a student at all-female Bryn Mawr College in 1995, Partridge came out as gay and embraced a call to the priesthood. Partridge then graduated from Harvard Divinity School, transitioned from female to male, was ordained an Episcopal priest, got married and completed his doctorate. Today, he’s a religion scholar at Harvard Divinity School and an Episcopal chaplain at Boston University.

Q: As a young woman attending Bryn Mawr, you came out as a lesbian, but also, in a way, as a religious person. How so?

A: When I got to college I’d been quietly wrestling with my sense of vocation for a few years. I felt drawn to academic work — ultimately in gender, sexuality and religion — but I also sensed a call to the priesthood.

Q: You’re married to a woman who was your partner when you both were women. And now, as a married straight couple, you’re a pretty conventional-looking family. But you don’t really like the designation “straight couple.”

A: On the one hand, I am read as a member of a heterosexual couple . . . Here’s the bottom line — perhaps cliche but true: This is about love. I love my spouse and my children. I love being a husband and a dad.